Monday, September 8, 2008

C9 & C10 (Thistletop Exterior)

The rigged rope bridge and fight with the goblins outside the hideout now form a single encounter. This has been done for two reasons: first, the rope bridge trap by itself is not very tactically interesting at all. Once spotted by the PCs (likely with their Passive Perception scores), it's not challenging to simply send two PCs across at a time. The other reason is that putting goblins and goblin dogs at one end of the bridge forces an interesting tactical dilemma on the PCs. Do they fight on the bridge and get bogged down, with only a couple party members fighting the goblins at a time? Or do they figure out a way to get past the goblins somehow?

Fighting the goblins with ranged weapons is a losing prospect. Not only can the goblins fire back (with surprising accuracy), but most ranged powers do not have enough range to reach across the length of the bridge. If the goblins find themselves overpowered at range, they simply retreat within the walls of Thistletop and inform Ripnugget, if he hasn't already heard of the attack. The onus is on the PCs to make it inside Thistletop. The goblins have the home turf advantage. I suggest the following encounter for a party of five adventurers:

Total: 1,200 xp (Level 6 Encounter)

The goblin dogs and Warriors begin the fight outside the walls, playing Killgull. They stop once they see the PCs and attack them immediately (though the one holding the gull-on-a-string continues to absentmindedly hold the string until he realizes he needs his other hand for something). The two goblins in the eastern guardtower (C15) rush downstairs to warn Ripnugget and protect the throne room while the goblins in the western guardtower (C13) are awoken by the battle on round four. After tossing the pickles off the tower, they join the fight by peppering the PCs at range. If the PCs head inside without killing the pickle thieves, they are quick to assume that the PCs will come to murder them next. Panicking, they scramble onto the outside of the guardtower and try to climb their way down and to safety. They do not join the fight in the throne room.

Stat block:

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like an interesting battle. Think I'm going to change the drop to 40 feet though, just to be consistent.

Scott said...

Consistent in what way? The original adventure places the drop at 80 feet, and with the damaged reduced by half to account for the fall into the surf it's an appropriate (if potentially quite dangerous) challenge for a 3rd-level party.

Anonymous said...

Consistent with the 4e rules for appropriate falls and damage. For a party at this level, a 40 foot drop is considered "lethal" and does 4d10 damage (unless I'm mistaken). I'd just rather not half the damage and then later, if they come to another similar drop, have it not match up.

You are being more consistent with the adventure itself though, which is cool. I'm just anal about rules like that sometimes.

Scott said...

I don't think it's inconsistent with the rules to say that the drop deals half damage because the fall ends in the water instead of a solid impact. An experienced diver can manage an 80-foot dive into water with little problem, so I think it's relatively reasonable to say that a character startled by the sudden fall would take half as much damage from the fall into water as from a fall of similar height onto a solid surface.

It's your game, though, so it's ultimately your call. Thanks for following along.

Anonymous said...

Ah, I hadn't considered the water. That's a good point. Maybe I'll stick to 80 feet after all.

Thanks man. I appreciate all the work your putting into the project.

Anonymous said...

So, has this project stopped? No new posts for over a month. I realize and appreciate all the time and effort this is costing you, but you'll let us know if you cancel it, won't you?

Scott said...

It's certainly not stopped. I realize the date on this post is from quite some time ago, but it was actually posted less than two weeks ago. I draft my posts ahead of time and keep them for my own reference when I run my game on Mondays. That draft sets the timestamp, and later is published after I've run my game and had a chance to adjust the encounters. In other words, the date attached to each post means practically nothing, as they are almost always published well after the timestamp.

And I would certainly make it known if I were stopping the project, but I don't foresee that happening. I have a solid group of players (8 of them, in fact) meeting weekly, and as long as that campaign runs I will publish the conversion notes.

tadkil said...

Very nice work and I am raiding you constantly.

I have a very nice tentamort (Solo Lurker) I hve built if you'd like. I would love to contribute to your project.

Scott said...

I've actually altered the Tentamort encounter. It will be posted fairly soon, but since the Tentamort has not been published in 4th Edition, and since the details of this encounter are relatively unimportant to the adventure itself, the Tentamort has been replaced.

That said, if you'd like to throw the converted Tentamort my way, I'd be happy to take a look at it.